By 1865, grammarian Justin Brenan could boast of “The rejection of the eternal semicolons of our ancestors. … The semicolon has been gradually disappearing, not only from newspapers, but from books–insomuch that I believe instances could now be produced, of entire pages without a single semicolon.”

WHOOO!! If you can dream it, you can do it! Death to apostrophes!

This article has also confirmed my deepest, darkest fears about those who use proper punctuation:

…the last writers to receive much notice for semicolon use have been a New York City Transit employee and the Son of Sam. In 1977 the NYPD speculated that “the killer could be a freelance journalist” because of his “use of a semicolon” in his taunting letters.

Forget what the world would be like if Dominionsts win… What would our lives be like if GRAMMAR NAZIS were in charge? *shudders*

There will always be grammar Nazis because there will always be grammar. You can’t communicate properly without some form of grammar, whether that’s through word order like English or case endings like Latin. Imagine if your idea of grammar was “Cory gives ERV the dog” by mine was “The dog gives Cory ERV” but we both meant the same thing? Communication breakdown, and I don’t mean the Chilliwack song.

And if there was no standardized spelling can you imagine how hard it would be for children to learn how to read? Teh resaon yuo nad I cna rade a snetecen lkie tihs is becuaes we leanred to raed propre splelde stuff ni teh frist plcae adn teh huamn brian is an ecxlelnet fzuzy pattren mtahcer.

While I agree that spelling/grammar flames are petty, I would have thought that a scientist like yourself would have agreed with the necessity for precision in communication.

I can’t finish it. I can’t think of another discipline so overrun with people who know very little, act as if they have the WORD, and have others falling over themselves to accept their pronouncements. As Mark Liberman once remarked:

Also, I have to say that I hate this role of correcting elementary errors of linguistic analysis, or questioning unthinking prescriptions that are logically incoherent, factually wrong and promptly disobeyed by the prescriber. Historians aren’t constantly confronted with people who carry on self-confidently about the rule against adultery in the sixth amendment to the Declamation of Independence, as written by Benjamin Hamilton. Computer scientists aren’t always having to correct people who make bold assertions about the value of Objectivist Programming, as examplified in the HCNL entities stored in Relaxational Databases. The trouble is, most people are much more ignorant about language than they are about history or computer science, but they reckon that because they can talk and read and write, their opinions about talking and reading and writing are as well informed as anybody’s. And since I have DNA, I’m entitled to carry on at length about genetics without bothering to learn anything about it. Not.

Or the letter C; for that matter. If you think about it; the letter C sometimes sounds like a K; and sometimes sounds like an S; so what good does it do? Oh; and yes; I;m using the semikolon throughout this post; bekause I;m getting it in until the lolspeakers take over and remove it from my keyboard.

Grammar Nazis are my heros! They brave being Godwinned by name, the jeers of their peers, the self-righteous tongue-lashings of the dyslexic, the minefield of typos tripping them up as they pursue their task, and now the blog-postings of anti-punctuationists.

Their courageous efforts may be all that shields us from a world in which u r BFF… in ur bkx… lulz r no moar lowd…

I have no particular problems with semicolons; I’m not exactly sure how to put it into words, but I never had any particular problem distinguishing between a semicolon and a comma. But then I’ve never been mugged and left for dead by a gang of rouge apostrophes.

Semicolons aren’t always pretentious; they can actually serve a significant rhetorical purpose when used intentionally. Certainly (and this might depend somewhat on one’s audience), I don’t think that every sentence which contains a semicolon could be written just as effectively with a comma (or perhaps similar punctuation), this makes for sloppy sentences which run together without any clear break or transition between ideas, and a semicolon makes the combination of separate thoughts work without having to cut the sentence off prematurely and segregate the ideas. (Of course, that doesn’t mean that semicolons should be used to make sentences go on for pages [this means you, Victor Hugo], but I digress.)

How else would you tie two ideas together, without using more connective tissue that just increases verbiage?; are we not all too busy to read more?
OR
How else would you tie two ideas together? You would need to explain the relationship of one idea to another. You would need to state that one is causal, or just establish the second idea as an outgrowth of the first, and make footnotes. Or you would need to use some artificial device to keep the ideas from mingling with each other.
See?

cockroaches are even more advanced they never use any punctuation at all they have to dive headfirst onto the typewriter keys to make them work it already gives them a massive headache it doesnt make any sense to waste a dive on punctuation

I don’t know why people have a thing against semicolons; I use them fairly often in my formal writing. Somehow they seem to make things less choppy. I don’t use them in my informal writing – most of the time I use dashes instead – and I hardly ever use commas in their place.

Do NOT get me started on serial commas vs. the AP Style Guide (damned newspapermen!), nor on our American tradition of putting the period inside a quote when it’s not part of the quote itself. I definitely prefer Douglas Hofstadter’s (and British) logic: If it’s part of the quote, it goes inside, if it’s not, it goes outside.

But I’d like to see broader usage of Guillemets (e.g., �what this sentence is immediately surrounded by�) as an alternate to quote marks (“”), to help distinguish between straight quotation ans sneer quotation. (Quote marks being used for sneer quotation.)

The semicolon is the single greatest punctuation mark in the history of the English language. I’m no grammar nazi; I won’t insist that others use it. But it won’t be completely dead until you’ve pried it from my cold, stiff fingers.

I’m something of a grammar Nazi. If you don’t use apostrophes and semicolons correctly, it jars against my delicate sensibilities and hinders communication. If you write “Abbies dog, Arnie”, I honestly can’t tell if you mean “Abbie has a dog called Arnie” or “Hey Arnie, Abbie is dog”. When speaking, you should say “Abbie has a dog called Arnie” because otherwise one can’t hear the difference between “Abbies dog” and “Abbie’s dog” which hurts and leads to patronizing letters. Alternatively, you could say “Abbie apostrophes dog” or waggle an apostrophising finger at the appropriate moment to make your meaning clear. The timing can get a bit difficult with possesives associated with plurals or names ending in ‘s’, so it is better to say “apostrophe” loadly and clearly in those cases.

I’m also going to defend the grammar nazis in the crowd. (*waves*) Some of us actually like that sort of thing. I’m quite crazy about semi-colons. Does this mean I have a trait in common with Son of Sam? Wow.

Efrique, that’s a damnable slander on the old Shakespearian. Too bad what works well at Stratford doesn’t work so well on television; Christopher Plummer does about the same things and nobody gets up his nose.

I say it is high time that all good grammarians stepped forward to condemn the blatant antapostrophism advocated on this blog. We must defend English against this insidious attempt to strip the language of its most beloved punctuation by one who plainly never learnt proper usage in the first place. Abandoning the apostrophe is but the thin end of a wedge designed to reduce written English to the near-gibberish standard of the average university freshman.

As an antantapostrophist I call on all true English speakers to arouse themselves from their traditional state of comma-tose indifference and put a full stop to this colon-ial campaign to reduce us to the monotonous monosyllabilism of the MTV generation.

When you think about punctuation symbols and the rules (read, “guidelines”) concerning their usage you might come to a conclusion that I came to a long time ago. That is, that the symbols and the rules are a matter of convenience, mostly.

Convenience for the writer in that certain thoughts are delineated for possible editing, of course. Even more convenience for the reader who, possibly a step behind the writer, will often find thoughtful markers placed so as to make the written word read like speech.

When we listen to someone speak we are constantly informed by information that is not speech; body language, tempo and pitch, facial expression and et cetera. This extra-vocal information is functionally punctuation. We blend the words and the extra-vocal stuff and are well informed of the speakers intent.

The extra-vocal is mostly lost in written communication. Punctuation symbols take the place of variations in speech. As such, they all have value in terms of discerning not only the content of the written word but its intent as well. I am assuming that these two variables, content and intent, are of significant importance in communications both verbal and written.

Only one apostrophe was enslaved in this comment and that was because I found it both convenient and useful. YMMV.

That should read “Only one semicolon was enslaved . . .” This mistake took place due to a previous mistake relating to the assigning of names to various things due to an exotic affliction. Not to worry, though; I got the ellipsis right.

You’re in decent company cutting the apostrophes – I’ve noticed Cormac McCarthy does without them a lot of the time. What markers besides the letters themselves (the space between words had to be ‘invented’ too) help legibility and clarity depends partly on what readers are used to, and how they’re wired up. Punctuation that really adds no precision (who, really, is going to confuse ‘dont’ with anything else) might just as well drop into disuse, but I reckon much of it does legitimate work. Doubtful – edit the html of the page and shuffle some of the pointy brackets and slashes around and see for yourself…

I like semicolons; they’re a useful way to join together related sentences.

That said, I’m baffled by people who seem to think English is slowly degenerating from some primordial Golden Tongue, passed down to Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare from YHVH. Linguistic evolution, like the biological kind, happens whether you believe in it or not.

Having stumbled upon this blog due to the recent events involving Rebecca Watson et al., I tend to agree with comment #48. However, I assume that you are in fact intelligent and well-educated. Why deliberately present yourself as a moron?

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